Friday, 20 December 2013

fat

a criminal word?

~~~~~

Should
calling a person “fat” be a criminal offence? This was the topic today on Radio
Scotland Call Kay. Some thought yes, some thought no. Unsurprisingly.

What was a
surprise was that no-one (so far as I heard) considered how such a crime would
be formulated in law and how it would be enforced. Joe tells Mary in their
kitchen that she is a fat slag. Does Mary want to put Joe in jail, or lay a
hefty fine on him? Where are the witnesses? Who pays the costs of the
prosecution?

If calling
someone “fat” was a criminal offence, it would take only a moment to find
another word to use. Will “chubby”, which can be used with affection or dislike,
need another law? How about “tubby”, “flabby”, “adipose” … there is no end to
the choice of words available to be unpleasant to/about another person.

And this is
the thing. The people who want calling a person “fat” to be a criminal offence
are really trying to make it a crime to be nasty. But being nasty. though
possibly not very nice, hardly ranks as a crime. If you try to make it into a
crime, you’ll probably fail to find a form of words that covers all the
possible ways in which one human can be nasty to another human using only the
weapon of speech. For the nastiness lies in the intention and attitude, not in
the actual words. You could call your enemy a “supremely good person”, and in
the right situation, using the right tone of voice, it would be an insult.

Do we really
want to live in a world where no-one is ever nasty about another person? No
more cartoons, no more edgy comedy, no more honest film/book reviews. No more
unthinking off-the-cuff comment. Only cautious assessment of possible witnesses
before saying a word.

If a person is
so hurt at being called fat that they want to make it a crime, I suspect them
of gross self-importance.

Monday, 28 October 2013

the leisure game

as played in

Stromness Academy

~~~~~

staff vs pupils

Up on the
flank of Brinkie’s Brae, the Slow Bicycle Race is finished, Throwing Up The
Welly Boot is over, and now it’s the Staff vs Pupils hockey match, staff
dressed in nappies as babies, pupils dressed as themselves except for three
senior boys supervising the game dressed, Godfather-inspired,
as Mafiosi.

mafiosi supervising

This is Stromness Academy in play mode.

Of course "school" derives from the ancient Greek word for leisure and the Latin for "school" was ludus, game. Hmm. Irony?

Another day, in work mode: O-Grade Latin have been writing up their account
of the episode where Julius Caesar, held hostage by pirates, promised to return
and defeat them and crucify them; “how amusing,” said the pirates; they were
less amused when he defeated them and crucified them. Ishbel has written it as
a square dance, brilliantly. I wish I’d kept a copy because now I can remember
only two lines:

Take your
pirate, five and six

And nail him to
his crucifix.

Another day:
an inspector is asking the class questions which I know they are well able to
answer, but they sit, round-eyed and silent, watching the smartly-suited,
fast-speaking foreign animal inviting them to think about Galatia in the Roman
Empire (now part of Turkey), and how the Galatian language was a Celtic
language which developed into Gaelic. From round-eyed, his hearers descend into
apathy: Gaelic happens some other place, the inspector has not done his
homework, this is Norse territory where the old language was Norn, and the
place they feel connected to is Norway; quite a few are learning Norwegian and
some go to Norway to learn how to play the Hardanger fiddle; there are plenty
of European connections, only not where the foreign animal is thinking.

Had he
realised it, their interest was easily aroused by the gorier bits of Roman
history, Caesar crucifying the pirates, Nero offing his mother, Claudius offed
by his wife; or by Catullus sailing his boxwood yacht from Turkey to his pad on
the shore of Lake Garda, or the cheating in the boat race in Book V of the Aeneid, the sort of things they knew
from their daily lives.

But whatever
topic the inspector had tried, he wouldn’t have got them speaking, for they
needed several months at least before they would relax enough to speak to a newly-arrived
creature fae sooth.

One year I
had a C-stream third-year class for maths; they named themselves Thick Maths,
inscribed the name on a placard and stuck it in the window of the portacabin
that was their classroom. They were lovely people: boys who were well able to
discuss the finer points of the John Deere versus the Massey Ferguson and which
was the better beast, Charolais or Simmental, and they could do quite
complicated calculations so long as it was to do with the farm, the fencing,
the amount of feed; girls who loved to do bills, to write down purchases,
prices, amounts, totals, in round, neat handwriting, every letter i having a
little flower instead of a dot, the addition reliably correct, chatting softly
all the time, admiring their friends, shredding the characters of their
enemies. I came to believe that they already knew everything they needed to
know for a good and satisfactory life in Orkney, and to try to “stretch” them
(such was the educational buzz-word) was not only cruel but pointless.

One small
group, four girls and one boy, were with me for extra arithmetic tuition, and I
had a little room with a computer for which I wrote a program that would screen
a simple calculation question, such as 9 X 7 on the screen and give, say, five
seconds for an answer. After ten such questions a mark out of ten appeared, and
the next pupil had a shot. They were all fine at doing this, and could all get
10/10. Then it gradually speeded up, and the slower ones began to drop by the
wayside; there would come a speed where no-one had time to key in an answer;
the winner was whoever was last able to get 10/10 – calculation speed plus
physical typing speed.

The fascinating
thing was that Henry was the slowest of the bunch, but the girls wanted Henry
to be best. So Laura and Susie sat each side of him, took a hand each, pressed
his fingers on the keys and made him the winner. Henry, a most amiable boy, was
pleased with the attention; the girls were content that the boy was best and
that they had made it happen.

Those girls
were women who had the power to achieve their ambition, and the knowledge of
how to use that power. They already knew all that was necessary to live the
kind of life they wanted. What use was school to them, I wondered.

Among the
pupils were a number of very talented musicians, some of whom are now playing
in orchestras. At one time my room was next to the music room, and it was a
pleasure to hear the startlingly professional-sounding flute, clarinet,
trumpet, violin and voice coming through the wall.

The
staffroom of course thrummed with knowledge and elevated discussion; three of
us, however, Gordon, Pie and I, preferred to play bridge, sometimes joined by
Crommy which would make a proper four, otherwise one of us bid two hands, an
exercise in phased forgetting if it was to be done fairly. We had only an hour,
and needed to play as many hands as we could in the time, so the bidding was
fast and extravagant to a degree that would curl the toes of a proper dedicated
bridge player. Some staff did not approve of our evil card-playing and once we
were glowered at, our poor tattered coffee-stained cards castigated as “the
devil’s picture-book”; but at that moment we were engaged in a 7-no-trump
doubled and re-doubled, and hardly heard the words.

R.E.
teachers came and went rather briskly: came with joy and enthusiasm, went with
sadness and disillusion and (sometimes) haste. One was unlucky enough to have
the same name as a TV cartoon character: if the cartoon had been South Park
(which had yet to be invented) his name would have been Cartman; this happy
coincidence led to him being tormented ruthlessly. He was misguided enough to
warn senior girls about the shortness of their skirts which might reveal their
knickers; the next week the senior girls turned up at R.E. wearing skirts
rolled up at the waistband to űber-mini-level, revealing vast purple bloomers; they
sat at the front crossing and uncrossing their legs, staring at him with hard
and lustful eyes. It was not long before he fled across to Caithness, where he
lived in his tent notifying the Education Office that he was taking sick leave
and requesting that his pay be sent to the nearest post office.

Latin and
Greek were the subjects I was initially qualified to teach, but when Latin
stopped being required for University entrance, and Science became three
subjects instead of just one, it was clear that the numbers choosing to learn a
dead language were going to decline sharply; up in the seats of educational
power the classicists tried to postpone the death of their subject by making it
easier: no longer did a pupil have to learn to write the stuff, no more worries
about gerund and gerundive; even translation became easier, since a lot of it
was now from a set book; questions on historical and cultural background were
introduced. All, predictably to no avail: the patient was doomed, and no
reduction of the effort required to grasp its subtleties was going to restore
it.

So naturally
I had a worry that I might find myself being slid over into the R.E. slot. My
knowledge of gods and their habits was restricted to the kind of episodes that
Greek writers found hilarious, for example:

role model celeb: Dionysos, god of wine

Vulcan is miffed because Venus (his wife) is
shagging Mars, who is athletic and beautiful, unlike himself, who is lame and
ugly though awesome at metalwork; so Vulcan makes a net of wire mesh and
catches in it Venus and Mars in flagrante
delicto, hauls them to where the gods are banqueting (a thing they did a
lot of) and dumps them on the table - an early version of writing to an Agony
Aunt, I suppose, hoping for sympathy for himself and a ticking-off for the
captives; but the gods just roar with laughter and sink some more wine and Jove
himself is heard to say “I wish it was me in there with her”.

Well back
into B.C. the serious thinking was done by people like the inventor of the
atom, or the chap who proved why, if you organised a triangle with sides 3, 4,
5, you’d got yourself a right-angle so that the sides of your house would fit
together. The gods seemed to fill the slot now occupied by celebs, providing
entertainment and awe, fodder for fans. The really powerful entity, before
which even celebs were helpless was Necessity, which meant something like “the
way things work”, the laws of nature that govern existence.

godly behaviour: Zeus carries off Europa

All of which
seemed to me to make quite a bit of sense, but fearing that this kind of
godliness, while it might have appeal for pupils, would surely cause trouble up
among the authorities, I started an Open University Maths degree course,
simultaneously enabling me to teach Maths rather than R.E. and letting me study
my favourite subject once again. Double whammy. Hence Thick Maths and Henry,
Laura and Susie, as well as Ishbel square-dancing Caesar and his pirates.

luggage gondola

There came a
year when it seemed an idea to take some of the Norway-orientated young to
Italy, to get a taste of the different life south of the Alps, and I organised
a trip to Venice and Florence during the Easter holiday. To get there we had
the ferry crossing, followed by train to Edinburgh and thence to London, a
night there in the Youth Hostel, flight to Milan, coach across Italy to Venice,
arriving 2 a.m., walk to hotel, baggage coming on a gondola – a long, strange
journey for most, who had never before even seen a train.

With us came
Ian MacInnes, head of Art, himself a fine painter, his wife Jean, Susie
Johnston, the doctor’s wife and a doctor herself, Frank Eunson (Geography) and
his wife Clare; and their expertise was most welcome.

Several
posts would be needed to do justice to that trip, just as a lifetime would be
too short to comprehend all that was on offer: all I can do here is scamper
briefly across the scene as it unfolded .

St Mark's, Venice

In Venice, Ian
conducted us all round the Accademia, telling us what and why and how; and we
were awed by the sheer size of Tintoretto and Titian on the walls of churches
just a step away from our hotel, gobsmacked by the magnificence of St Mark’s,
charmed to see mussel-gatherers in the lagoon rowing standing up and facing
forwards, impressed by the glass-blowers of Murano, incredulous about Attila
the Hun’s bum-print on a stone outside the cathedral on Torcello. Everyone will
likely have their own favourite pieces of wonderment; mine was the fleeting
notion, contemplating the complex group of domes on St Mark’s, that a person
with a sleeping-bag and a wee primus stove could live up there quite cosily,
hidden from public view, roasting a pigeon or two a day culled from the hordes down
in the square.

view from top of Duomo

And we had still
to sew up Florence: train from Venice, sleeping quarters in a vast flat near
the centre, enormous famous paintings in the Uffizi, gripping ascent of steep
winding stair inside the double dome of the Duomo, emerging outside onto a
perch with vertiginous view down to the street below, spectacular art and
architecture everywhere.

Bus to Fiesole up in the hills, peaceful Roman
theatre, great view of Florence down below.

tower summit

Day in Pisa, up the eerie winding
stair of the leaning tower, steps either very steep or almost flat depending
where you were in the circuit, faintly vertiginous feel at the top – what if it
chose this moment to finish its topple?

Pisa cathedral and leaning tower

Into the cathedral to watch the swing
of the mighty pendulum, as Galileo had done 400 years earlier. Discover a new
favourite food – ice cream with brandy (adults only).

Then coach
to Milan, flight to London, quick tour, courtesy of Jo Grimond (our MP) of
House of Commons, train to Edinburgh, train to Scrabster, discovery that the Ola had broken down, oh no, how to get
across to Orkney … unless, yes, headmaster MacLean arranged for us to be picked
up and flown across, hurrah! Back to the centre of things, brains almost
swamped by the many marvels we had momentarily touched the tips of.

And, for one
boy, near starvation because of a disinclination or inability to eat pasta.

Monday, 14 October 2013

Discovery and Resolution

and Erebus and Terror

~~~~~

Stromness: just
across the road from our house was Login’s Well, where Cook and Franklin took
on water for their ships, and part of our house was the custom house where
crews signed on, and the house itself was part of the former Login’s Inn. So we
were encircled by powerful historical vibes.

T E R R O R

Our
youngest, Em, was the first to move in, before any furniture, eager to be near
her friends. But at 2 a.m. we had an urgent phone call to come and rescue her
from the monster sea-lice. Though less than chuffed at the time, I’ve since
read that “one to three sea lice are enough to kill a
juvenile pink salmon newly arrived in saltwater” so probably a juvenile Em newly arrived in Stromness was right to be
wary of the brutes.

A trapdoor
in the kitchen floor revealed the space beneath our pier, a perfect hidey-hole
for miscreants at low tide, half-full of black water at high tide – though a
miscreant standing on tiptoe, and patient enough to wait for the tide to
recede, would survive – if the monster sea-lice didn’t pick him off first.

When we
first moved in, there was a splendid privy at the end of the pier, wherein one
could sit enthroned watching the Ola heading
straight for one’s comfort zone, and hoping that the captain would apply the
brakes in time. Afterwards one could lean over the pier wall and watch the
jobbies heading out into the harbour, recalling a joke I’d first heard in the
olden days sailing at Cramond: the wind dropped, I forgot to close the
self-bailer and was greeted by (a) intruding jobbies and (b) the obligatory
Joke “you’re just going through the motions, ho-ho-ho”.

The
privileged viewpoint on the pier was eliminated, first by the spouse who (for
some obscure reason) dismantled the privy, and later by the construction of a
sewer (as had also happened at Cramond, putting the Joke out of business).
Thereafter one had to use the throne at the top of the house, with an identical
view of the Ola, but from a greater
altitude and no ho-ho.

Once
furnished and lived in, the house lost its appeal for the monster sea-lice, but
the occasional harbour rat would come by, hoping for a treat. Harbour rats were
big chaps, and there were lots of them living along the sea-front. At
lunch-time third-year boys would go down to the harbour with fishing-rods and
catch them; probably best not to inquire what they did with them once caught.

Later on, we
had a cat, Thomas, who was a brilliant ratter, and tidy with it: he would lay
his rat out neatly on a plastic bag at the front door, eat the middle bit and
leave the fore and aft pieces for the first person out of the door in the
morning, usually myself, still swilling the last bit of toast and gulp of
coffee, in too much of a hurry to clear away Thomas’s left-overs.

Kay, Cee and Em on Rackwick beach

From
Stromness it was a fine day out to take the ferry over to Hoy and walk the track
across to Rackwick’s beach, colourful boulders, stupendous cliffs, little
stream with plank bridge for weans to bounce on, scattering of wee stone
houses.

One day I went up Mel Fea, the hill south of the bay, and came across
the remains of a crashed aircraft; many aircraft remains lie among the Scottish
peaks, and there are at least three on Hoy; I imagine the cause had usually
been cloud down over the summits, but since all you have to do to clear any
summit in the U.K. is stay above 4,406 feet it seems likely that a false
reading from the altimeter might have contributed: when I was on a gliding
course (thus noticing this sort of detail) I saw an altimeter zeroed at the
start of the day, a thunderstorm came and went, and in the afternoon the
instrument read 1000 feet, a difference that could easily plough the pilot into
a hill.

Up there above the Pentland Firth among the bare stones and heather,
with the wind whining through the propeller and rattling the bits and pieces of
aluminium the thought of what it must have been like for the pilot gave me the
shudders, and I was glad to get down to the beach and bairns bouncing on the
plank bridge.

E R E B U S

If there was
plenty of time to catch the last ferry, you could go back via the western
cliffs, past the Old Man of Hoy; the cliffs are awesome, and so are the bonxies
(great skuas), which don’t want you anywhere near their nests and would really
like it if they could drive you over the edge to your doom. The bonxie is a
cousin of Erebus, classically the embodiment of primordial darkness,
the son of Chaos. He is the Dalek of the bird scene; “ucksterminate!” is his
cry, usually abbreviated to “uck”.

As you cross
an invisible line that marks bonxie territory you hear a statement of intent, “uck”,
and here comes Mr Bonxie, bug-eyed with paranoid hatred and determination,
straight for your belly-button; if you have prudently brought a stick you can
raise it above your head so that he attacks it instead of your precious scalp; whoosh,
off he goes, but from the rear here comes Mrs Bonxie belly-button-bound: “uck”,
stick, whoosh, off she goes, “uck”, here comes Mr B again, whoosh, “uck”, Mrs B
… and then you pass the other invisible
line, and Mr and Mrs Bonxie toddle off back to their nest, happy
bunnies, they’ve beaten off the enemy. Ah, phew, now you can enjoy the scenic
wonders again, “uck” no you can’t, you’ve crossed into the next bonxie’s
territory … and so it goes, lightning glimpses of majestic cliff between bouts
of bonxie-battling. Since the bonxie gets his food by making other birds vomit
up their catch, it’s tempting to think you might down a tin or two of sardines
before trying to cross his territory and divert him with a nicely timed puke,
but I’ve never had the necessary supply of sardines to hand at the moment of
need.

Famously,
just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, and
perhaps the bonxie can’t be blamed for his behaviour: he may have heard about
our human tendency to assassinate wildlife and feel that proactive is the safe
way to go.

After the
harassment of the bonxie (and the wariness in case you fall over the edge, whirling
to repel his advances), it is very peaceful down at the pier waiting for the
ferry back to Stromness. But sometimes when the tidal current is at its fastest
it is like crossing a fast river boiling over the underwater rocks, and it
might be best not to finish off the sardines until you are back in Stromness.

One of the
wonders of Stromness after life in the sticks was the shops: now we could instantly
access a wide array of goodies without needing our wheels, for in that one long
street running along the line of the harbour were two butchers, two bakers, supermarket,
clothes shop, shoe shop, book shop, newspaper shop, cafè, pubs, hairdresser, doctor,
lawyer, blacksmith, plumber, art gallery, post office, probably much more that
I’ve forgotten. Recently I’ve heard that some of these no longer exist and that
now you need the wheels again, to go to Kirkwall, 14 miles away. Sad.

Up till now
I had always happened to teach in girls’ schools, and selective ones at that.
But in Stromness Academy the pupils came from the whole population of West
Mainland and numbered around 500. Some were very bright indeed, and were headed
for university; some saw no point at all in school and were only filling in
compulsory time until they could get on with their real life, which they were
already living out of school hours, driving the John Deere or serving in the
cafè. Some who left Orkney to go to university were utterly charmed by the
anonymity and the larger world that opened up for them, others found themselves
unable to live in a place where no-one knew them, and lasted only a term before
coming back permanently.

the Holms; Hoy in background

D I S C O V E R Y

“Activities”
happened on a Friday afternoon (apparently learning doesn’t rank as an activity
in the wonderful world of education). For me, this came to be a “ramble” which meant
that I took people for a walk; often the people were third-year boys. One day
at low tide we were able to get out on the Holms, the two low islands at the
mouth of the harbour; the boys found long sticks to have pretend-fights with; I
was beginning to find out what a different animal the boy is from the girl. A
Friday came when I took them in the car to the cliffs at Yesnaby; it was
raining hard and blowing what other cultures would call a hurricane, so the
boys didn’t want to get out of the car and walk anywhere; but I wanted to go
and see if any more pieces of cliff had fallen off recently, so away I went for
half-an-hour or so; when I came back, soaked, and got in the driving seat and
looked at the dashboard, I found that all the control knobs had been pulled out
and were hanging down on wires. Girls would have just been chatting, maybe
destroying some classmate’s reputation but leaving the control knobs alone.

R E S O L U T I O N

This post
has gone on long enough: a detailed study of the microcosm that was Stromness
Academy needs a post all to itself . . .

Monday, 7 October 2013

Spoots and Peats

(the beaches and moorland of Orphir)

~~~~~

There are
those who would kill for their peat-bank, and since the right to a peat-bank is
often murky it’s a wonder that the heather is not littered with bodies. For a
good peat-bank can provide fuel at only the cost of the work needed to get it,
and for anyone who likes being out in the sunshine digging (once you have the
right tool – the tuskar) and stacking at a steady pace the work is pretty
pleasant; if your peats are of a good texture, well dried out and stacked
properly at the back door, there is your year’s fuel, a huge freebie.

the joy of cutting peat

We were
lucky enough to have acquired a peat-bank along with a big house in the middle
of Orphir, with a fine outlook across the Flow. Somewhere up among the
peat-banks was the boundary of the estate, marked not by any fence or wall but
described in the old titles as the line of sight from a piece of Newcastle coal
to Orphir schoolhouse, about three miles away. In vain did I look for the piece
of coal; no doubt it had long since buried itself in the peat or formed part of
someone’s fuel stack, and I wondered how that boundary could possibly be
decided now. You might think that since it was only moorland it wouldn’t much
matter, but you only have to see the red glow in the eyes of even the mildest
man who thinks that a bit of land belongs to him to realise that it does matter. A
lot.

spooters at Waulkmill

Another
freebie, this one yielded up by the beach, is the spoot (razorfish) which, when disturbed, burrows down into the sand, causing a spurt of sandy
water to squirt into the air. The spoot-hunter, armed with long knife and
bucket, stalks his prey walking slowly
backwards. Mr(s?) Spoot feels the tread of the stalker and, preferring
flight to fight, wheechs away down to what he believes to be safety; sadly,
this very strategy causes the spurt that reveals where he is: had he only lain
perfectly still his assassin would have passed onwards, never knowing that he
was lurking there. But now the spooter thrusts his long knife into the sand at
the spot marked by the spurting of Mr Spoot, pinning him down; then with his
free hand he howks Mr Spoot out into the bucket, and from there to the waiting frying
pan.

Waulkmill beach

Perhaps one day a spoot will evolve
that chooses to freeze instead of flee, and the practice of spooting will die
out. But meantime, lightly fried, they are regarded as a delicacy by some, maybe the same people who gorge on snail porridge and jellyfish ice-cream.
Personally I’d prefer a mackerel any day.

Swanbister beach

A spoot ebb (low water during the big
equinoctial tides) tempts the aficionados of spooting out onto beaches that are
mostly deserted, for the temperature and wind strength are seldom such as to
encourage one to lie about smeared with sunblock, reading about the fifty
shades; but those of us who enjoy the emptiness of the rippled sand, the clear
water, the distant horizons , the oystercatchers, the seals, the tepid shallow
water of the Flow beaches, the breakers and intense blue of the oyster plant at
Skaill, become Orkney-beach addicts.

~
~ ~ ~ ~

Marian, another
ferrylouper, moved into the district not far from us, and we became friends;
she was from the U.S.A., and was astonished to find that she couldn’t get
bullets for her beretta, and worse, that she was expected not to carry it with
her at all times. One evening she visited us when we were watching The Goodies;
on screen Tim Brooke-Taylor spread the Union Jack over a table, sat down in a
chair and put his feet up on the flag. Shocked to the core, Marian said
“He’s put his feet on your flag!” “So?” said we, “it’s only a piece of cloth,
it’ll wash.” But no. Feet on flag was desecration, and punishable by, er, what
exactly? It remained unclear.

We were both
keen bridge players, and would often travel into Stromness of an evening to
make up a four with a colleague of mine, Ishbel, and her grandfather; Marian
and I took turns of being driver for the evening, and it was a quite
frightening experience being the passenger, for Marian’s soul was still in the
U.S.A. and believed that here, in the 51st state, only ignorance and thrawnness
kept us driving on the left. The road between Orphir and Stromness had very
little traffic, and there were long straight stretches where one could relax,
but as Marian swooped, well to the right, round the S-bends at the start of the
Scorradale Road, extolling the superiority of the American number-plate system,
it was impossible to pay attention to her words, for I was poised to make a
grab for the steering-wheel if any oncoming vehicle should suddenly appear
driving on the un-American side of the road. Anyway she was already off on a
different theme – taxation: all citizens of the U.S.A. filed their tax returns
honestly and timeously, it appeared, whereas “you-all” (viz my friends and I
and all Brits) cheated and lied and paid no tax if we could possibly get away
with it. Both parts of which seemed unlikely, but argument would perhaps turn
her attention away from the road, so I buttoned the lip, watched the road,
hoped to survive.

The
grandfather, who had spent some time in U.S.A., got on famously with Marian,
and one evening she brought him a tomato plant in a pot. The only place he
could put it was at a small window with not much light and very little heat,
but it would be a clear loss of face if tomatoes never appeared. In the course
of time, when we arrived one evening we saw that the plant had produced large
dark-red tomatoes; Marian was enormously pleased, and the grandfather was glad,
for he had taken a lot of trouble buying the best tomatoes he could get hold of
and pinning them invisibly to the plant.

A heart
condition put Marian in hospital for a while; unable to believe that a hospital
stay was free, she wanted a room to herself, with her favourite bottle of
whisky, and was ready to pay for it; though she did get the whisky, the room
was not possible, and she had to share with three others who, to her vocal
disgust, were unwilling/unable to make up a bridge four. When I visited, the
three seemed barely conscious, but they might have simply been in retreat.

She remained
in Orkney, continuously amazed at the driving and taxation habits of us Brits,
and envying our tomato-growing expertise, until her death. Generous and
interesting, she left the neighbourhood the poorer for her going.

~
~ ~ ~ ~

Stromness
Academy had a nautical department which provided evening classes in navigation
and seamanship. With a spouse who was producing a constant stream of
sailing-dinghies, I thought it might be good to probe the inner secrets of
how to find your way over the trackless sea, although my colleague in maths
pointed out that nowadays all that old lore was useless because it had been
overtaken by satellite communication; but then he also said that computers
would shortly be able to produce accurate language translation, and I knew that
was unlikely, so I reckoned the old navigational lore could easily be useful –
especially as I had no satellite communication device.

Useful or
not, navigation was immensely interesting, and I borrowed the sextant for a
weekend, to see if I could put our house in its correct place on the chart by taking
a sighting of the sun at noon from our bedroom window which had a view clear
across the Flow to the low-lying north coast of Scotland. It was not easy. The
house moved half a mile inland, then out onto the water; but after a while I
got it in its true position, and was satisfied that if the day came that I was
lost in mid-Atlantic I’d be able to pinpoint my position – so long as I had a
chart, a sextant, a chronometer, and perhaps a compass, and so long as the
waves didn’t heave about too much, and so long as I could see the sun or some
recognisable star, and had the almanac … and a calculator … and some toast, and
coffee … yes, I was dreaming, but it was very gripping.

Signal flags
could be useful, I felt, for a wife trying to get a message across to a
nautical-minded husband; the best one had to be X - stop carrying out your
intentions and watch for my signals, failing which, perhaps L
- you should stop, I have something important to communicate might
work? would F - I am disabled, communicate with me be a tad too pleepy? was it worth
flagging J - I am going to send a message by semaphoreand continue by holding
wee flags and waving the arms about? no, that would mean having to remember
another great heap of signals, and Morse was hard enough.

My Morse learning was by sound signals, and I became
reasonably proficient, except that there were two pairs of letters that I often
mixed up, making the message “luckqou” somehow lacking in bite. Came the exam,
and it turned out that the Morse was done by winking light in a darkened room.
I had been up most of the previous night, and after a day at work I saw only
two or three flashes of the light in the dark room before I tipped over into a
dreamless doze, and awoke unrefreshed and groggy, needing to write down the
text of the message, and straight after that being given two pieces of rope and
told to construct a bowline on a bight; um, a bowline, easy-peasy, that was how
you tied on the climbing rope, but a bight? eh? a big, wide bay? how/what/why?
In the middle of this wonderment time was up, a minion came round with a bag to
collect the ropes, I did a swift bowline and hoped for the best.

Now at worst, lost in mid-Atlantic, not only could I find out
where I was, but also signal passing vessels that LXF with . . . -- -- -- . . . for
backup if they failed to notice. And luckqou if they steamed on regardless.

~
~ ~ ~ ~

canoe-eye view

In real life, meanwhile, we plootered about in the sheltered
waters of Scapa Flow in our yawl, once camping at Pegal Burn in Hoy where we
took a few cuttings of honeysuckle, visiting Cava, where two ladies of
advancing years lived in isolated contentment with never a mod con, rowing
across to Orphir when they needed to do their shopping. In our canoe I would
often float along the shore in the evening to see the seals that lived on the
nearby rocky headlands and listen to their song.

need to walk

In so many ways, Orphir was an idyllic environment, but it
had a down side - the daily journey to work, with the children (for there was
no school transport), and the increasing need to ferry the bairns about to
visit their friends (mostly done patiently by the spouse). In winter, the road
was often difficult; during one return home from Stromness the car ground to a
halt in deep drifts on the Scorradale road; we started walking, but when we’d
reached the foot of the hill we were most kindly taken in by the Orphir
schoolmaster and his wife and given beds for the night. There was a day when it
was impossible to get the car out onto the road, and I walked the 11 miles in
to work, on a breathtakingly beautiful day utterly silent; no traffic was
managing to get along the road until within a mile of the school. Dear me, too
late for register class.

The other continual worry was a monster mortgage: by today’s
standards, house prices were low, but interest rates were very high; Orkney
house prices started to rise, as they had already done down south, and there
came a point where we could sell our too-big Orphir house for enough to let us
buy a smaller house in Stromness outright. Living in Stromness would mean that
I could walk to work and that the bairns could see their friends whenever they
wanted.

Stromness from the air

We were extraordinarily lucky: we got a house right on the
shore, with a pier running out into the harbour, and before long our far too
many belongings were in their new home.A cutting from the Pegal honeysuckle came too, and is still
flourishing: I can see it on Google Earth.

Sunday, 29 September 2013

Boreas Domus Mare Amicus

(the north our home, the sea our friend)

~~~~~

“Now tell me this,” said Edwin Harrold, with a twinkle
in his eye and a much-too-solemn face, “if a hen and a half lays an egg and a
half in a day and a half, how many eggs will three hens lay in three days?”

Oh, no, it was riddle time, and there was no right answer; some of the
possible replies were

1. 3
eggs, the expected answer?

2. you
can’t have half-hens laying half-eggs, true but boring

3. 6
eggs, disappointing?

Which would
be best? #1 would give the pleasure of seeing the ferrylouper (incomer) fall
into the trap; #2 would label you as an anorak; #3 would be a nuisance – a more
cunning trap needed.

But it was
too wondrous a place to worry overmuch, because we were in Happy Valley, which
Edwin had created out of a rather dismal stretch of moorland, converting it
into a tiny paradise by planting trees and creating waterfalls in the little
burn. Edwin’s house grew heather on its roof and had an electric light bulb
which lit up when Edwin pulled a wire which caused a little paddle-wheel to dip
into the water of the burn and generate electricity.

Edwin is no
more, but he typified all that was attractive in the Orcadian: a fine
craftsman, inventive, independent, happy with a kind of life that had hardly
changed (except for the wire and the light bulb) in the last many thousands of
years. Before retiring, he had repaired ancient monuments such as brochs for a
living, and one could easily imagine him building a broch and living in it,
cosily and efficiently, peaceful but ready to repel any invader, whether by
riddle or by even sterner measures.

The
ferrylouper had to be assessed to find out whether and where it might fit into
the community, and was subjected to many tests, though none of them quite as
difficult as the Happy Valley Inquisition. “What do you think of Orkney
butter/cheese/homebrew?” was easy. But it was also very easy to put a foot
wrong, through blind southern habit. There was a day that we took the canoe to
Harray Loch, paddled up to the other end, a distance of about 4.5 miles, and
beached the canoe, intending to walk back to the car; but no need, for up drove
our car, helmed by our postman, who gently let us know the error of our
big-city ways: “You’d taken the keys, so I had to hot-wire her.” We grovelled;
but at least we hadn’t locked her, for we were learning.

We had arrived in the
winter of 1968-69, and since there were no teacher’s houses available in
Stromness itself, we were housed in Kirbister schoolhouse three miles or so
away; “Will your man put you to the school?” asked the Director of Education,
revealing an expectation of feminine inability that had long since vanished
farther south; legend had it that the last teacher at this school had been a
stern woman who made the children cut her grass with nail-scissors – a teaching
practice unknown in the south. And there was plenty of grass to cut, for the
school had an acre of land, some of it tarmacked but all the rest grass and
wild flowers.

the road was drifted in

It was an interesting
winter, with a lot of snow drifting in wind which reached over 100 knots before
it blew away the Kirkwall airport anemometer. In our house drifts of snow piled
up inside tightly closed windows, and when I went out to fetch coke for the
stove I was blown away up the iced tarmac and had to crawl back. The road was
drifted in, but it was not too far to walk to Stromness, so long as I started
about an hour earlier than usual; one morning when I set out around 7:30, with
the full moon shining on an unnaturally windless and totally silver landscape
and not a human nor a vehicle to be seen for miles, I have to confess that I
turned back, with the excuse that the two-thirds of the pupils who were bussed
in from the country would not be going to school that day. An inglorious
decision, but a beautiful day, in which we built an igloo, and took a candle into
it that evening and sat very cosily in sleeping-bags reading our books.

“The sea our friend” says Orkney’s
coat of arms but the sea around Orkney has strong tidal currents; an online
pilotage guide for small craft advises how to navigate the Pentland Firth:

when a swell is opposed to the
tidal stream, a sea is raised which canscarcely be imagined by
those who have never experienced it;and, if … the wind is light and with
the stream, a sailing vessel becomes unmanageable.

The morning of 18
March 1969, when the maroon went off, I was teaching, and was struck by the
indrawn breath and absolute silence in class; all eyes were fixed on the
window, which looked out over the harbour. They knew what it meant, though I
did not, having been in Orkney less than four months.

It meant a call-out
for the lifeboat, all of whose crew were known to, or even fathers of, the
pupils, most of whom also knew the reason for the call-out: the Longhope
lifeboat had gone missing in the Pentland Firth the previous night, in a force 9 gale and 60-foot waves, on her way to
help the Irene, in difficultiesoff the coast of South Ronaldsay. The Irene ran aground, and all her crew were
rescued by breeches buoy, but the lifeboat had disappeared.

Later that day she was found, capsized, the entire
crew drowned, a man lost from every homein the tiny community where the lifeboat was based.
If 130,000 men were wiped out today in Edinburgh in the space of 24 hours it
would parallel that catastrophe in numbers, but not in personal grief unless the
130,000 were all neighbours and friends of the entire population of Edinburgh;
worse still, two families had each lost a father and two sons - what sort of
parallel could you find for that in a big city? It was an incident in the face
of which mere statistics tell you little of importance.

As
this dire news trickled in, the whole island grieved, for, as we were coming to
realise, this was a place where John Donne’s famous lines

no man is
an island, entire of itself; …
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

were part of the way of
life for people needing to survive in a small group of islands nearer Norway
than London.

So
much for Mare Amicus. Perhaps Orcadians
called the sea “friendly” in the same spirit that the ancient Greeks called the
Furies Eumenides – “kindly”?

Old Man of Hoy

Our
travel between Orkney and Scotland was usually two hours in the Ola, passing Hoy and its Old Man, across
the Pentland Firth to Scrabster; it could be a lovely journey or
unlovely-going-on-horrendous. One return to Stromness after a holiday south with
the three bairns lives in the memory. Leaving Scrabster the word was that it
was too bad to go the usual route west of Hoy, so we’d head eastwards and get
into the shelter of Scapa Flow. Not many minutes out of Scrabster, mass passenger-puke
started, and the luggage began to slither to and fro across the floor. Time
passed, and the entrance to the Flow drew nearer, but so did the cliffs as the Ola fought against the tide-race off Hoxa
Head (probably where the Longhope lifeboat had capsized), a fight that the
tide-race won, so back up the Pentland Firth we lurched, past the awesome
western cliffs of Hoy, round the corner into Hoy Sound, and finally into
Stromness Harbour, where the luggage settled, colour returned to the passengers’
faces and, after more than seven hours, we were home. Well nearly, because
there was no-one to meet us, the spouse having given up on us and gone to a
party. But a car pulled up, its door opened and our doctor said “You’ll be
needing a lift” and took us out to Kirbister.

In
one day, the worst and the best aspects of life on an island. Hardly blemished
even by finding the sink in the schoolhouse piled with a fortnight’s worth of
washing-up.

~ ~
~ ~ ~

coat of arms, 1975

Boreas Domus:
now that the north was our home, how appealing was the landscape to the eye of a mountain
addict?

At first, unexciting:
fields, fences, a bit of moorland, no rocks, no trees. But the periphery, cliffs
interrupted by the occasional beach, was where the buzz lay. The coast near
Yesnaby was just two miles away across moorland from our house; and there were
miles of cliffs, caves, geos, sea stacks; in a few places one could get down to
sea level, where on a stormy day the ground could be covered by sinister foam
over welly-boot-height: sinister, because there was no telling what (if
anything) lay underneath it, and because a big wave could come in and suck you
away unless you kept a look out and were nimble; mostly the cliffs leaned
outwards, and only from down at sea level could you see the caves that crouched
below the overhang. The local wisdom was that Orkney was gradually tilting over
to the west, whereas the rest of UK was tilting to the east; where, I wondered
was the place where the two opposing tilts were grinding past each other – perhaps
the middle of the Pentland Firth? No one would hazard a guess, or perhaps it
was an ignorant question.

Yesnaby Castle

Two sea-stacks south of
Yesnaby were once arches jutting out from the land until the middle of the arch
collapsed into the sea; this was how the Old Man of Hoy had morphed from
headland in 1750 to arch by 1820 and later become a stack (“ - for now!”, as
scottishgeology.com gleefully adds).

interesting rock detail

Near Yesnaby was
an arch across which you could reach a platform allowing a fine view of the
cliff face; I went there a lot, with caution because a sudden gust of wind
could easily hurl you down past all that interesting rock detail and smash you
on the spikiness at its base, and also because the whole structure had the feel
of something that might collapse at any time. I confided this thought to the
local wisdom, a fount of geographical lore, and it bent on me a patronising
smile of sympathy for my cowardice and said “It’s been there for thousands of
years, it won’t be collapsing any time soon” – a train of logic that I found
odd, considering the history of the Old Man of Hoy, and decided to stay
cautious, fearful and (hopefully) unsmashed.

The next week end I went
back to exercise my fearful caution once more … and it was gone. The whole lot,
arch and platform, had fallen into the sea, and near the edge, where it had
connected with the land, the ground now sported a series of parallel cracks, as
though great chunks of the cliff edge were just about to dive off after their
brothers into the friendliness of the sea.

moors near Yesnaby in winter

Often I would walk from
Kirbister across the moorland to reach the cliffs; half–way there was a tiny tree,
a prostrate juniper roughly two inches tall; I used to bend down and sniff its
leaves for the gorgeous smell of gin that it gave off; one warm day I lay down
beside it for a prolonged gin-snuffle and became aware that the ear pressed to
the ground could hear the booming of the sea sucking in and out of the caves far
below, a mile away from the edge of the land. Suddenly it felt like being on a
honeycomb rather than solid ground.

Yesnaby, looking south to Hoy

There was a misty winter
day when I’d left home later than usual, and darkness fell before I’d reached
the sea, but I kept on, thinking no wind, not too cold, if necessary I could
follow the cliffs north to Yesnaby and return by road. As heather and peat
underfoot gave way to grass and gravel I knew that the edge of the cliffs must
be near, but could see nothing through the foggy darkness. Until the feet
stopped of their own accord and the ears told me that something had changed –
there was a low echoing mutter that had not been there a second ago. As I stood
there the mist drifted and parted, and I saw that I was standing a few inches
from the edge, where the next step would have been my last … if the old lizard
brain hadn’t done its job.

After all, this northern
home, this friendly(?) sea had its excitements.